"We can’t afford to go commercial free"

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: production houses in two categories—the Raters and the Differentiators. Raters would be everything from a Spiderman to A Mighty Heart to The Mummy and viewings such as An Inconvenient Truth and Blood Diamond would fall under Differentiators. Our objective is to air content which targets all the viewing segments—family, children, stay at home moms etc.

Twenty five per cent of our content is original, such as Entourage and Big Love. We have more home productions coming up that we cannot announce yet.

What is HBO India’s revenue break-up from ads and subscription?

Without sharing exact numbers, I would say it is balanced, but skewed more towards advertisements. We currently have about 30 million viewers and 300 advertisers. We hope to see ad revenues grow by 15-20% over the next year.

Does HBO have plans of bringing any of its other channels to India?

No, there are no plans to bring other channels to India. The cost of launching a channel is high what with the carriage fee and marketing costs, and unless there is a strong business case we will not add channels in the country.

Already there is a deluge of channels in the market and the cost could vary between $50 and $200 million. Many of the new channels such as 9X were able to launch because they adopted a free-to-air model, which means that they get zero revenue from subscriptions. Now, the total market for ad revenues is about $2 billion; so for a new channel to be viable, it would need to target about 5-10% of this market.